This is a blog about my experiences with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, tips and tricks as well as news from the CRM community.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

CRM with “no software” ?

I was inspired to write this post when I saw at the grocery store a can of lemon juice that said “contains no chemicals”, then I wondered: Isn’t lemon juice just citric acid with other bunch of chemicals? Even a freshly squeezed lemon is just a mix of chemicals that make what it is. Now, what does this have to do with CRM? Well, it immediately reminded me of a company marketing CRM as “no software, no hardware”! They certainly do not sell a bunch of notebooks, telephone books and pens that they call CRM, it is just a tricky marketing strategy for their product (which I fully admire and respect). But of course CRM is software and it should be sold as such. Whether the software is on the cloud or in your premises is a different story.

Perhaps I am being too up-tight, but sometimes I feel marketing blurs the line between advertising a product for what it is and tweaking words to give a deceptive impression, I imagine someone might buy that lemon juice thinking that it is healthier than the competitors.

1 comment:

In the case of lemon juice, they typically add preservatives or sometimes it straight citric acid with lemon oil to give it that lemon flavor.In the case of Cloud based CRM, I think they simply mean that there's no software or hardware to manage.But the term "cloud" and "software as a service" "On-Demand" are, in and of themselves, a marketing terms to gussy-up the concept of essentially renting access to hosted deployments over the internet; so I can't really blame Marketers from adding to the mystique in this manner.The more honest term would be Renting Software On Someone Else's Servers, but RSOSES is a sillier acronym than SaaS.

About me

I used to be part of the CRM product team at Microsoft and I recently joined the Avanade Canada team as a consultant in the CRM Service Line, I developed a sort of delight in seeing how Dynamics CRM is evolving as a platform (xRM) and how its feature set has matured to be able to model and address plenty of business scenarios beyond Customer Relationship Management. I was recently given the Microsoft MVP award in Dynamics CRM and I am really excited to be part of the program and continue contributing to the CRM community.